India's Indix providing cloud insights for marketers

With a database of 250 million product URLs, over 50,000 brands and nearly 10,000 product attributes, Indix aims to deliver real-time insights on products, pricing, promotions, channels and much else besides.

Today, brands and retailers spend a big chunk of their time searching online for information to help them do their jobs more effectively. If they could only conjure up product information in real-time for any of the world’s one billion-plus products and service, they would be much better off.

Indix’s product intelligence platform aims to provide just that, delivering real-time insights on products, prices, promotions, availability, channels and competition—including coveted statistics such as which items are hot and which are not—across millions of products and billions of price points.

This is a dream come true for a product manager who can now lift his or her game in merchandising or new product development. Or launch innovative promotions, all the while backed by solid data and insights. It can also be a valuable tool to an online retailer venturing into the world of ‘anticipatory’ shipping, where a company tries to second-guess the mind of a frequent shopper.

So far, SaaS cloud solutions have catered to sales professionals thanks to CRM tools, to marketers courtesy of marketing automation software, and financial analysts courtesy of ERP systems, but there’s really not been anything like that for product or brand managers or even retail merchandisers.

Now, the latter can customize Indix’s reports and notifications as well as a personal dashboard so they can, like their peers in other departments, avail of instant data-driven insights to drive revenue and profit. For instance, a drugstore chain customer of Indix’s was able to identify product lines that were under-priced compared to the competition, and a quick tweak in its pricing model led to to improved profits.

Started by a Microsoft veteran, Indix recently raised US$8.5 million in Series A-1 funding from Avalon Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners, taking its total to date to US$14.4 million. The company says its database contains around 250 million product URLs, over 50,000 brands and nearly 10,000 product attributes.

In a world where brands and retailers need to be plugged into the world’s most complete catalog as a competitive necessity, Indix’s ‘infinite’ catalogue in the cloud aims to do just that.

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